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Jerry and Me: Fan Psychoanalysis
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First,
the cross-cultural shock: Jerry Lewis dubbed for the Iranian market. (We will
learn that, in later life, Jerry sounds exactly like the guy who dubbed him
back then.) Not to mention John Wayne in Rio
Bravo (1959): a handy subtitle informs us that he is now saying,
exasperated, as he walks out on Angie Dickinson, ‘There is no god but Allah’.
Jerry and Me (2012) by Mehrnaz Saeedvafa (sometimes written Saeed-Vafa) begins by proposing this estranging ‘view from elsewhere’: Lewis in the distorting mirror of another culture. Film history, as it has generally been written, only occasionally gives us a glimpse of this kind of shuttle-action across cultures, nations and audiences: a Latin American star such as Carmen Miranda as seen ‘back home’ via the detour of her Hollywood productions; or the cult of certain US actors in Japan. But an entire treasure-trove of spectator experience opens up once we loosen the bounds of territorial belonging, as Saeedvafa does here. It is a different Lewis than the one we are used to encountering – compared against the negative example of Woody Allen or against the positive one of mentor Frank Tashlin, for instance in the critiques of Saeedvafa’s friend, co-writer on the book Abbas Kiarostami (Illinois University Press, 2003) and special consultant on this project, Jonathan Rosenbaum.
But
that is only her starting point. The fate of Lewis’ films handily mirrors an
Iranian history through which the filmmaker has lived: born in the early 1950s
during the ascension of Mohammed Mosaddeq as Prime Minister, through the heady
period of modernisation in the ‘60s (evoked in wonderfully gaudy colour
newsreel footage) during the Shah’s White Revolution; later, the Iranian
Revolution of the Islamic Republic. Where Lewis’ movies (among others) embodied
American-style modernity during the ‘60s – a theme taken up, from different
perspectives, by commentators including Miguel
Marías and Chris Fujiwara
– the ’79 Revolution marked a radical turnaround in cultural values: the lush
‘picture palaces’ were closed or burnt, and a new sort of cinema production was
enforced by the authorities. Meanwhile, Hollywood decadence was replaced by
previously unseen art cinema such as Rome,
Open City (1945).
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Saeedvafa
had begun seriously learning about cinema in the early ‘70s, abandoning other,
more conventionally pragmatic studies in order to attend film school in London
(where she discovered the work of Robert Bresson). Back in Iran, when the
Revolution hit, she turned – as did many of her contemporaries – to making a
film centred on a child. Then the eight-year war with Iraq started; Saeedvafa
had to abandon the film in an unfinished state, and came into conflict with her
producers. In 1983, after a first marriage that foundered on differences of
religious practice, she left Iran for the US, where she has been based ever since,
employed as a Professor of Film and Video at Columbia College in Chicago. Her
films before Jerry and Me include A Tajik Woman, Saless Far From Home, Ruins Within and A Different
Moon – but, tellingly, you will find mention only of The Silent Majority (1987) and Jerry
and Me on IMDb.
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What
is most fascinating for me in Jerry and
Me is the quality of something I could call fan psychoanalysis. A type of self-analysis, arrived at through (to use the classic psychoanalytic couplet) introjection of,
and projection onto, a beloved object: in this case, the performances, films,
image and career of Jerry Lewis. It quickly becomes much more than a conceit of
the personal documentary or essay-film form that clips from Lewis movies stand
in for absolutely everything in this
piece, whether good or bad, as tokens of Saeedvafa’s lived, social experience. The
Iran/Iraq War is summed up by Jerry dodging debris in a battle zone. Mehrnaz as
an uncommunicative, unreachable teenager is embodied in a catatonic little boy
who Jerry yells at on stage. Her wish to magically transform into someone else
– such as someone with light skin – finds its symbolic correlative in Julius
Kelp becoming Buddy Love, via magic potion, in The Nutty Professor (1963). Shots of Jerry in Cracking Up (aka Smorgasbord,
1983) stand in for Saeedvafa’s own exhaustion and despair in the US during the
‘80s, before the period when her son was born. And on it goes, for the entire
thirty-eight minutes: the range of inventive, wittily metaphoric substitutions
of Jerry-images for absent (often unrepresentable) real-life footage is really
impressive. (It is also intriguing to compare the film with Saeedvafa’s Jerry-less
account of her life for the 1992 interview included in Zohreh Sullivan’s Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora [Temple University Press, 2001].)
Gender
and a feminist coming-to-consciousness play a crucial part in this
self-analysed life-narrative. Jerry, once again, fills all roles available for
men in Saaedvafa’s developing imaginary, from childhood through to adulthood:
he is the cold, indifferent womanising man (like her father), in a cowboy hat; he
is Jerry in drag, wishing to cross the all-too-real line of gender difference;
he is a gentle, sentimental, almost effeminate comedian. But, as she remembers
it, she could never get into the place reserved for women in even his best
films: the supplicant partners – Mad Men-style
‘60s career women ever-ready to chuck in their careers – who always end up
saving this eternal boy-man. And this, too, in a boomerang way, reflects back
on Saeedvafa’s Iranian history, in which calls for ‘today’s woman’ collided
with crushingly restrictive patriarchal rules. And a certain sexual panic
crystallises for her in the images of the ‘loose’ Western woman as embodied by
Stella Stevens in The Nutty Professor.
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Like
many self-analyses (whether on film or in life), Jerry and Me proceeds (and this may also be a result of its
condensed running-time) through dramatic, block-like shuffles: at times it
seems as if Saeedvafa views her whole biography in terms of a ‘lost paradise’
in her Iranian childhood that she can barely recall, and then idealised
projections – such as distant, exotic, America – that then come crashing into
grim, depressed reality once encountered. There is an almost desperate need to
identify, to belong – as when her son is born (a moving sequence of the film),
and she tells us that, at last, she felt she had ‘become American’. The very
making of Jerry and Me – which, the
work itself tells us, was difficult for her to ‘bring together’ – appears to get
her to at least a provisional point of equilibrium: teaching a course on Lewis
and being able to ‘reprocess her past’ while giving her students an Iranian and
Middle Eastern perspective on this American icon; and being able to observe, up
close in person, the live Jerry of the mid ‘90s who makes casual, racist jokes
against Arabs – and still be able to thank him, in the final frames, for
‘having given me countless hours of pleasure’.
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Pleasure
in cinema – pleasure in a star, a body, a genre, a gag – is never simple. This
is the cross-cultural field that Jerry
and Me opens for us.
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from Issue 3: Masks |
© Adrian Martin January 2013 Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |
